Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Poetically Charged Guidebooks

We just enjoyed our annual meeting with our publisher, Avalon Travel. They flew to Seattle this time, and twenty of us sat around our conference room table for most of the day getting up-to-date on our guidebook work. I’m thankful to have a publisher I’ve been friends with for 15 years with a staff that works well and closely with mine. We’re all enthusiastic about the mission of our teaching. And when we get together, either in Seattle or in Berkeley, we break from the huddle ready to make our guidebooks better and more efficiently than ever. We know Europe, and Avalon knows publishing.

The two most quotable quotes of the day from our publisher:

“Our sales are up, but that’s to a great degree because Europe guidebook sales were down the most in the economic crisis last year.”

“How you’ve grown without being aware of what others are doing is truly remarkable.”

We used to brag, “Don’t be fooled by overweight guidebooks” — celebrating that our books were light and easy to pack. Now most of our editions have put on weight and come in at 600 to 900 pages. We asked if this was a concern. Our publisher replied, “No. As long as your books are lean, crystal clear, and poetically charged, more is more.” (Though he did admit that our page count — combined with our priority to keep the books portable — is “pressing the limits of modern printing technology”).

While everything used to hinge on annual updates, now we update with nearly every printing whether it’s a “new edition” or not — so the actual new edition is less important. We are “constantly updated.” This means that some of our biannuals (the lesser-selling half of our books, which are undated and come out in “new editions” only every two years) are actually updated more often than every other year — just without a new cover. Not having a date on the cover is a plus for bookstores because they don’t need to clear the shelves each 12 months. So with “constantly updated,” we get the best of both worlds: shelf space and updated content. The biannuals are selling as well as they would if they had dates on the cover, it’s more efficient for the retailers, and we sneak in our updates between new editions when we reprint the book.

New printing technology makes it easy to make small but efficient print runs, enabling us to publish shorter and much less expensive guidebook excerpts we call “Snapshots” (for example, Norway, Stockholm, and Denmark, which are derived from our bigger Scandinavia book). This allows readers to buy just the destinations they want. It also takes the pressure off us to address the market demand for these regions, and it lets us test-market destinations to see where a full-fledged guidebook would be justified. Of our twenty-some Snapshot titles, Barcelona is a top seller. That indicates that, if we were to publish another full-fledged guidebook, it should be Barcelona.

Traditionally, my publisher is always pushing for more new titles. But now he’s satisfied that we’ve covered Europe pretty well. The one thing we’re missing is “pocket guides.” Our competition is selling lots of these smaller trim, full-color, distilled versions of standard guidebooks. Until now, we’ve given them a free ride. In 2011, we will get into that game.

Our sales are pretty good. We’re in the top tier (Frommer, Fodor’s, DK, Lonely Planet, Rick Steves — in no particular order), and the top tier leaves everyone else in the dust. Out of every 100 books we sell, 82 are sold in the USA, 9 in Canada, 5 in Europe, and 4 everywhere else. Everyone’s excited about electronic books, iPhone apps, and digital publishing — but it’s still only 3% of our total sales revenue. Both my publisher and I are encouraging our staffs to keep our eyes on the prize: printed-on-paper guidebooks.

With our phrase books, we took on Berlitz and won (outselling them in bookstores). With our journal, we took on Moleskine and lost. We designed a cool journal in two sizes, but it just doesn’t sell. I think it’s overpriced, and encouraged my publisher to go wild in reconsidering their pricing. Stay tuned.

The big stress in the book business is how to adapt royalties and author payments to electronic books. Amazon and Apple are jockeying to lock up the electronic sales. Map sales are going to hell in a handbag — hit much harder than guidebooks by Internet alternatives (Google Maps and GPS). The American Booksellers Convention is not the vibrant thing it used to be.

The thirtieth anniversary of my first edition of Europe Through the Back Door is this May. We’ll have a little party.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.